Saturday, October 15, 2011

For the last several days, we’ve been hearing a lot about the demonstrations being staged in lower Manhattan and around the country: Occupy (Fill in the Blank) – Occupy Wall Street, Los Angeles, Washington…thousands of people taking to the streets to express their frustration over the economy and anger at Wall Street. It remains to be seen how far the protests will go, or how long they’ll last. It’s unclear if they’ll even have any impact.

But the protests have reminded me of another demonstration — one that was very different from what we’re seeing on Evening News.

It happened 50 years ago last weekend, October 7th 1961, in the Polo Field at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. By one estimate, the crowd that day numbered 550,000 people. And like the people gathered on Wall Street these days, they were doing something countercultural, even radical, by demonstrating something almost unthinkable today.